My own arch linux install guide

This is my personal guide and I will installing it with hyprland and Wayland. If you feel lost you may visit the official wiki!

First-Steps

• Read the official wiki
• Get the official iso image from here
• Verify the signature
• Prepare the installation media using rufus, balena or similar
• Boot the USB changing the boot order in bios.

Keyboard-Layout

The default console keymap is US. Available layouts can be listed with:

# ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/**/*.map.gz

This is changeable using loadkeys:

# loadkeys es

Verify the boot mode

To verify the boot mode, list the efivars directory:

# ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

If the command shows some directories without any errors, then the system is booted in UEFI mode. Otherwise, the system may be booted in BIOS mode.

Connect to the Internet

First, try pinging in order to know if we are already connected to the Internet

ping archlinux.org

If we are connected, you may skip this step

Numerate all network interfaces

# ip link

Normally, enp0sX is the wired interface and wlanX or wlp3sX are the wireless interfaces. Wired connections should be enabled just by plugging in the RJ45 cable. For wireless connections, iwctl command should be used. (I will be using wlan0 for convenience, use your own interface name)

First start the iwc daemon:

# systemctl enable --now iwd

Now scan the close range connections

# iwctl station wlan0 scan

Get a list of the scanned networks

# iwctl station wlan0 get-networks

Then connect to the desired one

# iwctl -P "PASSPHRASE" station wlan0 connect "NETWORKNAME"

Finally check if the connection is established by sending one ICMP packet

# ping -c1 archlinux.org

If you get Unknown host or Destination host unreachable response, you are not online yet. Use dhcpcd tool to assign an ip to your device

# dhcpcd

Update PGP keys

# pacman-key --init
# pacman-key --populate archlinux

Easy Instalation

You may use archinstall or anarchy to install linux easily. If ur goal is to learn how linux actually works behind the scene, keep reading.

Hard Installation

Update the system clock

This command shows the system clock.

# timedatectl status

If it is desirable to change the timezone, use this commands:

# timedatectl list-timezones | grep "Europe/"  | less
# timedatectl list-timezones | grep "Asia/"    | less
# timedatectl list-timezones | grep "America/" | less

Then apply the changes

# timedatectl set-timezone "Europe/Dublin"

To change Time and Date

# timedatectl set-time '2023-01-28 19:42:50'

Partition the disks

When recognized by the live system, disks are assigned to a block device such as /dev/sda, /dev/nvme0n1 or /dev/mmcblk0. To identify these devices, use lsblk or fdisk.

# lsblk

Results ending in rom, loop or airoot may be ignored. We need at least 2 partitions:

• One partition for the root directory.
• For booting in UEFI mode: an EFI system partition.

Swap partition is optional, but it's advisable to create it aswell Other partitions like /var /opt or /home can be create separately.
If you are installing arch in a vm, I simply recommend installing a root(/) and a home(/home) partition.
This is the disk scheme I will be installing: (Total: 326.6gb)

Mount point	Partition	Partition Type	Suggested size
/mnt/boot	/dev/efi_system_partition	EFI system partition	At least 300 MiB
[SWAP]	/dev/swap_partition	Linux swap	More than 512 MiB
/mnt	/dev/root_partition	Linux x86-64 ext4 root (/)	At least 20 GiB
/mnt/home	/dev/home_partition	Linux x86-64 ext4 home (/home)	Remainder of the device

My scheme will be EFI: 1 GiB, swap: 8Gib, /: 80GiB, /home: 237.6

Let's use sda as our disk. DISCLAIMER IF YOU HAVE ALREADY AN EXISTING OPERATING SYSTEM AND YOU ARE PLANNING TO DUAL-BOOT, DO NOT CLEAN THE MAIN DRIVE.

• First we have to clean the main drive

# gdisk /dev/sda

• Press x to enter expert mode. Then press z to zap our drive. Then hit y when prompted about wiping out GPT and blanking out MBR. Note that this will zap your entire drive so your data will be gone - reduced to atoms after doing this. THIS. CANNOT. BE. UNDONE.

• Now we are going to start partitioning our filesystem

# cgdisk /dev/sda

• Press Return when warned about damaged GPT. Now the screen shows the list of partitions. Naturally, it must show free space since we have cleaned our disk, otherwise, feel free to delete all partitions. To select all available space, just simply leave sector space blank

• Create the boot partition

  • If you already have a efi partition that is being used by windows or other os, do not create another one. Just mount the existing one to /mnt/boot
  • Hit New from the options at the bottom.
  • Just hit enter to select the default option for the first sector.
  • Now the partion size - Arch wiki recommends 200-300 MB for the boot + size. Let’s make 1GiB in case we need to add more OS to our machine. I’m gonna assign mine with 1024MiB. Hit enter.
  • Set GUID to EF00. Hit enter.
  • Set name to boot. Hit enter.
  • Now you should see the new partition in the partitions list with a partition type of EFI System and a partition name of boot. You will also notice there is 1007KB above the created partition. That is the MBR. Don’t worry about that and just leave it there.

• Create the swap partition

  • Hit New again from the options at the bottom of partition list.
  • Just hit enter to select the default option for the first sector.
  • For the swap partition size, follow the gold rule: x1.5 your RAM. Hit enter.
  • Set GUID to 8200. Hit enter.
  • Set name to swap. Hit enter.

• Create the root partition

  • Hit New again.
  • Hit enter to select the default option for the first sector.
  • Hit enter again to input your root size.
  • Also hit enter for the GUID to select default(8300).
  • Then set name of the partition to root.

• Create the home partition

  • Hit New again.
  • Hit enter to select the default option for the first sector.
  • Hit enter again to use the remainder of the disk.
  • Also hit enter for the GUID to select default.
  • Then set name of the partition to home.

• Lastly, hit Write at the bottom of the patitions list to write the changes to the disk. Type yes to confirm the write command. Now we are done partitioning the disk. Hit Quit to exit cgdisk. Go to the next section.

Format the partitions

Once we got our partitions created, we must give them an appropiate type. For swap it is swap type, for efi it is fat32 but in the other hand, root and home are kinda debatable. People usually use EXT4, but there are other benefits about using btrfs or xfs. We will be using the old EXT4, but it is up to you. (In my case, sda1 is efi, sda2 is swap, sda3 is root and sda4 is home, but is may not be in yours. Check it out!)

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4
# mkswap /dev/sda2
# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1

Mount the file systems

Mount the root volume to /mnt

# mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

Create a boot mount point and assign it to efi partition

# mount --mkdir /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi

Now create a home mount point and assign it to home partition

# mount --mkdir /dev/sda4 /mnt/home

Finally enable swap volume with swapon

# swapon /dev/sda2

Installation

We are halfway done. Let's install the base linux packages with pacstrap

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware vim iwd dhcpcd networkmanager

Dont forget to install this later !!!

Fstab

This is a file that stores descripting information about all filesystems in our linux system.

# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Check the resulting /mnt/etc/fstab file, and edit it in case of errors.

Chroot

Change root into the new system:

# arch-chroot /mnt

Timezone

Set the time zone, list of available timezones are in /usr/share/zoneinfo/. Select yours and link it to your localtime:

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Dublin /etc/localtime

Run hwclock to generate /etc/adjtime (hwclock is used to adjust hardware clock)

# hwclock --systohc

Localization

Locale is the language that your system is going to use. This include characters, numbers and other specials symbols.
Possible options are located in /etc/locale.gen.
If you used loadkeys earlier, you may make the layout persistent
Open this file, scroll and uncomment your preferred locale. I'm using en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

# vim /etc/locale.gen

Generate the locales by running:

# locale-gen

Next, create a new locale configuration file and save the locale as shown.

# echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf

Network Configuration

You can create and edit the hostname file

# echo "IncredibleHostname" > /etc/hostname

Alternatively, and not in chroot mode, you can change it later

# hostnamectl set-hostname myhostname 

Now open /etc/hosts to add matching entries to hosts

127.0.0.1    localhost  
::1          localhost  
127.0.1.1    MYHOSTNAME.localdomain	  MYHOSTNAME

Download this packages that will help ur later.

# pacman -S netctl

Initramfs

Creating a new initramfs is usually not required, because mkinitcpio was run on installation of the kernel package with pacstrap. For LVM, system encryption or RAID, modify mkinitcpio.conf(5) and recreate the initramfs image.

# mkinitcpio -P

Root Password

Set the root password

# passwd

Adding Repositories - multilib and AUR

Enable multilib and AUR repositories in /etc/pacman.conf. Open it with your editor of choice

Adding multilib repository

Uncomment multilib (remove # from the beginning of the lines)

pacman easter eggs

You can enable the "easter-eggs" in pacman, the package manager of archlinux.
Open /etc/pacman.conf, then find # Misc options.
To add colors to pacman, uncomment Color. Then add Pac-Man to pacman by adding ILoveCandy under the Color string:

Color
ILoveCandy

Also uncomment parallel downloads that speed up our pacman downloads

Update repositories and packages

To check if you successfully added the repositories and enable the easter-eggs, execute:

# pacman -Syu

If updating returns an error, open the pacman.conf again and check for human errors. Yes, you f'ed up big time.

Add a user account and a user group

Add a new user account. In this guide, I'll just use MYUSERNAME as the username of the new user aside from root account.

# useradd -m -U -G wheel,storage,power,video,audio,rfkill,input -s /bin/bash MYUSERNAME

This will create a new user and its home folder.
Set the password of user MYUSERNAME:

# passwd MYUSERNAME

Add the new user to sudoers:

If you want a root privilege in the future by using the sudo command, you should grant one yourself:

# EDITOR=vim visudo

Uncomment the line (Remove #):

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Install the boot loader

You can install systemd-boot or grub, here's the installation of both:

systemd-boot

# bootctl --path=/boot/efi install

Create a boot entry /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf, then add these lines:

title Arch Linux  
linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux  
initrd  /boot/initramfs-linux.img  
options root=/dev/sda3 rw

If your / is not in /dev/sda3, make sure to change it.

Now update boot loader configuration

# vim /boot/loader/loader.conf

Delete all of its content, then replaced it by:

default arch.conf
timeout 0
console-mode max
editor no

grub

Install base grub packages

# pacman -S grub efibootmgr

If you dual-boot with other operating systems, you may consider installing os-prober

# pacman -S os-prober

Then install grub on the EFI directory as shown

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB

Now run this command to show boot entries but Arch

# os-prober

If you have other os and it is not in the output, follow this steps:

# exit
# cgdisk /dev/sda
(now change the label of efi partition to boot and write changes)
# vim /etc/default/grub
(uncomment "GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false" and exit)

Finally install the grub configuration file

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Exit chroot:

Exit the chroot environment by typing exit or pressing Ctrl + d. You can also unmount all mounted partition after this.

Enable internet connection for the next boot

To enable the network daemons on your next reboot, you need to enable NetworkManager.service for wired connection and iwd.service for a wireless one.

# systemctl enable NetworkManager iwd

Reboot

Finally, reboot.

Next steps

Now we gotta install display server or protocol, a window manager and compositor (X11), besides all the packages that will convert our system in a rice linux, just like this unixp*rn. You can now continue to the Second Part